2010-05-25

Making progress

So after the first two months at work I have finally made some visible progress on the communities homepage.

This is not to say that I have not achieved much at all, but most of that was behind the scenes. I got a Help community started, worked with volunteer community moderators on succession planning and elections, stuff like that, but this Monday the first major design change took place.

Behold: Before and after.

Before, the main section of the page is dominated by sliding boxes with featured communities' names written on them. The UI is not self-evident, and the majority of clicks go to the visible boxes, while there are 15 or so there.

After, the featured communities are listed clearly, and one of them is featured more than others. This one community will change once every two weeks or so, depending on whether there is much going on there, like a launch, an event, or some such.

I know, this is not really a radical change, but it is a start, and more subtle changes will follow, hopefully resulting in an overall improvement of the communities user experience.

And that, my dear friends, is one of the reasons I come to work every day: To make the communities' users' lives easier.